There are many advantages to remote collaboration between groups. It allows meetings to occur on a more regular basis between remote colleagues, without incurring the expense and personal stresses of frequent business travel. True collaboration often requires many informal meetings. Such meetings are often most useful when there is natural support for parallel lines of discussion.
For example, when meetings occur with all participants in one physical location, there typically will be one primary line of discussion or a small number of parallel “break-out” lines of discussion. These discussions are typically comparatively long lived (10 minutes or more) and open to members joining or leaving. At the same time, several simultaneous side discussions will typically start and end between collaborators. These side conversations have a more confidential quality to them, with participation being through explicit initiation or invitation, and they tend to be shorter lived (sometimes as short as a minute). Such side conversations have various levels of required confidentiality but, even when not sensitive, will often be best done “privately” so as to avoid stalling or side-tracking the main lines of discussion.
There are many video conferencing systems that are aimed at reducing the amount of travel required while still allowing collaboration between remote groups of participants. Most provide support for a single thread of communication between the remote participants. Audio, video, whiteboard, and computer files can all be shared between the remote groups but the sharing is done from “site-to-site” with little or no support for parallel, simultaneous discussion threads involving subsets of people from the different groups. This hinders or completely prevents the type of “break-out” sessions and “private aside” discussions that are useful between subsets of large collaborative teams.
Audio conferencing systems provide some degree of support for private, side commentary. However, these systems support side commentary by assuming that each of the various participants is using a separate telephone handset. An even greater limitation of these systems is that they interfere with (e.g., mute) the channels of the participants who have not been invited to participate in the private conversation. These excluded lines are isolated and are unable to continue with their discussion in parallel with the private conversation.
Accordingly, a more efficient way of supporting multiple threads during remote collaboration is desirable.